Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths

All of this was triggered for me by the death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions. Part of this is explained by the fact that Hitchens — like other long-time media figures, such as Tim Russert — had personal interactions with huge numbers of media figures who are shaping how he is remembered in death. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for any human being to ignore personal feelings, and it’s even more difficult in the face of the tragic death of a vibrant person at a much younger age than is normal.

But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writing but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.

Corey Robin wrote that “on the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself,” and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens’ post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket (“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was “exhilaration” because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call “Islamofascism”: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”

Hitchens, of course, never “prosecuted” the “exhilarating” war by actually fighting in it, but confined his “prosecution” to cheering for it and persuading others to support it. As one of Hitchens’ heroes, George Orwell, put it perfectly in Homage to Catalonia about the anti-fascist, tough-guy war writers of his time:

As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that ‘the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s legs’ was ‘a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain.

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. As Robin put it:

Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist. He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.

Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”

Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda:

I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.

In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with “Just you wait!” and other taunts, fully confident that once the U.S. took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets–with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he’d always said so. It’s amazing that he’d dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won’t care.

Currently, Hitch is pushing the line, in language that echoes the reactionary Paul Johnson, that the U.S. can be a “superpower for democracy,” and that Toms Jefferson [sic] and Paine would approve. He’s also slammed the “slut” Dixie Chicks as “fucking fat slags” for their rather mild critique of our Dear Leader. He favors Bush over Kerry, and doesn’t like it that Kerry ”exploits” his Vietnam combat experience (as opposed to, say, re-election campaign stunts on aircraft carriers).

Sweet Jesus. What next? I’m afraid my old mentor is not the truth-telling Orwell he fancies himself to be. He’s becoming a coarser version of Norman Podhoretz.

Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint. To enshrine him as worthy of unalloyed admiration is to insist that these actions were either themselves commendable or, at worst, insignificant. Nobody who writes about politics for decades will be entirely free of serious error, but how serious the error is, whether it reflects on their character, and whether they came to regret it, are all vital parts of honestly describing and assessing their work. To demand its exclusion is an act of dishonesty.

Nor should anyone be deterred by the manipulative, somewhat tyrannical use of sympathy: designed to render any post-death criticisms gauche and forbidden. Those hailing Hitchens’ greatness are engaged in a very public, affirmative, politically consequential effort to depict him as someone worthy of homage. That’s fine: Hitchens, like most people, did have admirable traits, impressive accomplishments, genuine talents and a periodic willingness to expose himself to danger to report on issues about which he was writing. But demanding in the name of politeness or civility that none of that be balanced or refuted by other facts is to demand a monopoly on how a consequential figure is remembered, to demand a license to propagandize — exactly what was done when the awful, power-worshipping TV host, Tim Russert, died, and we were all supposed to pretend that we had lost some Great Journalist, a pretense that had the distorting effect of equating Russert’s attributes of mindless subservience to the powerful with Good Journalism (ironically, Hitchens was the last person who would honor the etiquette rules being invoked on his behalf: he savaged (perfectly appropriately) Mother Theresa and Princess Diana, among others, upon their death, even as millions mourned them).

There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing. There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” — hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch – rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud. But what these paeans to Hitchens reflect even more so is the warped values of our political and media culture: once someone is sufficiently embedded within that circle, they are intrinsically worthy of admiration and respect, no matter what it is that they actually do. As Aaron Bady put it to me by email yesterday:

I go back to something Judith Butler’s been saying for years; some lives are grievable and some are not. And in that context, publicly mourning someone like Hitchens in the way we are supposed to do — holding him up as someone who was “one of us,” even if we disagree with him — is also a way of quietly reinforcing the “we” that never seems to extend to the un-grievable Arab casualties of Hitch’s favorite wars. It’s also a “we” that has everything to do with being clever and literate and British (and nothing to do with a human universalism that stretches across the usual “us” and “them” categories). And when it is impolitic to mention that he was politically atrocious (in exactly the way of Kissinger, if not to the extent), we enshrine the same standard of human value as when the deaths of Iraqi children from cluster bombs are rendered politically meaningless by our lack of attention.

That’s precisely true. The blood on his hands — and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role, in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents — is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten. One is, of course, free to believe that. But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions when highly misleading elegies are being publicly implanted, all in order to consecrate someone’s reputation for noble greatness even when their acts are squarely at odds with that effort.

“The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting.”

And the people who make comments about innocent people killed during war are never those who lived under a murderous tyrant, had entire cities purged around them, and embrace their new-found freedom and chance at life.

If you want to attribute deaths to Hitch (because, writing in support of something makes you culpable, obviously), can I attribute genocide to you, for supporting Saddam Hussein? Can I make the same tenuous links between those events and your refusal to protect a society from a despot?

The try-hard-to-be-liberal-whatever-the-reality types always pretend that inaction is some default, and any negativity associated with it is just one of those things. Nobody wants innocent people to die, but part of being a responsible adult is to evaluate possible paths, and which leads to the best result. I imagine the millions of Iraqis living without Saddam would not welcome him back. Do you believe they would?

//Danny 19 December 2011 at 12:48 pm

You know, the Iraqis have stated through survey multiple times that they would have been happier without US involvement. If you read the news you will see that they are still tyrannized by a government which is increasingly polarizing itself. American military sitting there didn’t help at all. It probably impeded the process. Look at the Arab Spring. People are capable of being empowered on their own. The Arab Spring would have also been a lot easier on the uprising civilians were their tyrants not bearing American armaments.

//Esma 19 December 2011 at 7:54 pm

It is a profound indictment to Greenwald and his colleagues on the left,none of whom could not hold a candle to Hitch or raise their voices in debate with him, that following his death, out-pours of untruth, mistruth and half-truth are aimed and directed at the great journalist of our time through the scope of a spineless ‘liberalism’.

You may like to envision Hitchens beside Dick Cheney, being suckled by Condeleeza Rice, however, that image does not stand up to scrutiny. If Greenwald had an ounce of diligence, he’d know Hitchens underwent a intellectual journey throughout the 1990’s, wherein he could no longer (as an internationalist) denounce the actions of the United States vs the opposing force. For example, in Bosnia, Hitchens thought as bad as the Imperial United States are, surely Slobodan Milosevic is worse? Conducting ethnic cleansing on a mass scale (on Muslims no less). Furthermore, as pathetic as the United States had been in their dealing with Saddam, surely it is our duty to remove him, rather than let him continue to immeserate and terrorise Iraqis. That, in my opinion is the true liberal position, the promotion of solidarity with victims of totalitarianism.

But team Greenwald say no. Nothing imaginable could be worse than the U.S. Not rape rooms and families being forced to watch their kin massacred, the Military Industrial Complex is far less benign. Hitchens allied himself with the Kurds primarily, the persecuted peoples of northern Iraq. The argument that Hitchens is blood-soaked is fatuous as it seems the only way to escape being bloodied is to be dominated by Saddam Hussein (in the minds of the Greenwald school) Moreover, Hitchens was not a coward who wrote only from his bedside in the Ritz or his home in Washington. Hitchens visited Iraq many times, he visited Cuba, Iran (attending Friday prayers), North Korea, Zimbabwe and told stories from them all. Notably, getting beaten up by Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon. Hitchens was no coward and cannot be expected to be criticised by Glenn Greenwald… a man so pesky, he said that detaining his boyfriend at an Airport in England would have him release classified documents about my government.

Mistakes were made in Iraq, it distracted us from issues in Afghanistan, yes. But all you say is the world is complex. Because we cannot do everything (try as we may) does not mean we should do nothing. The Greenwald position would have let Rwanda occur, would let Saddam trample his people, would let Assad continue to conduct air-strikes on civilians. This is the truly reprehensible position which would have blood-letting occur and us simply shake our heads or even worse our shoulders and turn away.

Many on the left so hate the west that they equivocate it with tyrannies. They use obscure moral inversions to justify why Bush is responsible for a million deaths and not the Al Qaeda and Fedayeen Saddam remnants who actually blow up Shi’a mosques intentionally and with glee.

The opinions of Mr Greenwald who is a betrayer to the United States and our most principles anyway,and he is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong and the knife he sticks into Hitch could only be done when Hitch died of cancer. Prithee, how is the coward?